Free No Reservations Required by Ellen Hart

Bob’s funeral, her life had become unnaturally still. While events swirled furiously around her, nothing touched the silence that had become her world. In the last few weeks, Andy had retreated into a sullen shell. The distance she’d felt growing between them before Bob’s death had seeped suddenly into every part of their relationship. For months, Anika had been thinking about asking Andy for a divorce. But asking him now would be like throwing a drowning man an anchor.
    When Andy had proposed eight years ago, he’d insisted that he didn’t want a traditional wedding. Specifically, when they said their vows, he wanted the words “for better or for worse, until death do us part” replaced with the phrase “as long as love is good.” Perhaps he’d had a premonition. Anika didn’t know. But what she did know was that their love had ceased to be good a long time ago.
    She traced the disintegration to Andy’s first week as associate editor at the Minneapolis Times Register. Bob had offered him the job out of kindness, out of the desire to help his brother through a rough patch, and probably as a way to get to know him. Andy had grown up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and had attended Northern Michigan University in Marquette on a journalism scholarship. He’d received his degree in 1987. For the next few years, he’d worked as a reporter at various small-town papers across the country. He hated big cities, and working in small towns allowed him to become a big fish in a small pond. It provided him with a chance to really make a name for himself.
    Andy craved success. But the first paper he worked for folded after only a few months, and the next was sold after he’d been there a little over two years. Andy lost his job to a relative of the new owner. The third job he took paid so little that he subsisted on Kraft macaroni and cheese and peanut butter sandwiches for the duration—just under a year. After his fourth job ended because the owner of the paper died suddenly and no one else in the small town had any interest in keeping it going, Andy moved back to Marquette. It was the spring of ’94, and he was depressed, exhausted, and penniless.
    One day, while having a cup of coffee at a shop on Milford Street near NMU, he’d run into an old buddy of his who was seriously considering a start-up publishing company. Rick Lostine had the money, but what he didn’t have was a good editor—a partner, really. Rick was the same age as Andy, also from Ann Arbor. They’d been friends since grade school. Rick’s enthusiasm was so contagious that Andy said he’d kill for a chance to be that editor. He explained that he was sick to death of newspapers where he had to do everything from editing and reporting to paying the light bill. He couldn’t finance the plan, but he’d developed considerable editing skills over the past six years, and he promised he’d work not only gladly but tirelessly to make the idea a success. Thus, Lostine & Gladstone Publishers was born.
    Anika met Andy for the first time that spring. He was so passionate about what he was doing, so upbeat, focused, and energized that Anika thought that’s who he was. Andy Gladstone was a man on fire, a man who loved books as much as she did. Watching the publishing house take shape was almost as exciting as falling in love. Maybe it was all part of the same fabric. It was certainly hard to separate the two in her mind now.
    Lostine & Gladstone started out slowly, publishing only two books that first year. But five years later, they were publishing twelve books a year, both fiction and nonfiction. As far as Anika could see, Rick and Andy had done everything right. They’d taken their time, learned through trial and error the best ways to approach various publishing problems. Andy had the capacity to throw himself into his work with total single-mindedness. And yet he always had time for Anika. Andy was a romantic. He loved to bring Anika little gifts, plan